Sustaining Innovation During Challenging Times
The last few months have been ‘challenging’ to say the least.
Now we are officially in recession and many businesses have been tempted to batten down the hatches – and put their innovation pipelines on hold until better times return.
For most businesses, that’s a terrible mistake.
Creating Your Future Core
Bold marketers know there’s no better time to embark on agile, disruptive innovation programmes – than when your competitors have their ‘eyes off the ball’.
It takes courage, but those marketers who embrace an agile, experimental approach – can seize the opportunity and generate the innovations that will transform their businesses over the next three to five years – and build their ‘future core’ – whilst their competitors are paralysed!
Agile & Experimental
Your ‘future core’ can be anything from a stretching-extension of your current portfolio – to a radical-reinvention of your business’ core competence.
The challenge is to reframe & redefine markets, harness & leverage new technology – and place the consumer at the heart of everything you do.
Along with our carefully selected scouting technology partners, we can help you reframe opportunties, experiment with delivery models and incubate!
#1: We Put Consumers At The Centre
We use design thinking to put consumers at the heart of the innovation process – and help predict how we can deliver their ‘ultimate experiences’.
Careful interrogation of their aspirations, observation of their current behaviours, and analysis of their pain-points – can reveal their unmet needs. It also helps us spot opportunties to enhance their current experiences, match your current best-in-class competition and get closer to delivering the consumers’ ultimate experience.
Our experienced quali moderators regularly leverage a variety of online insight-gathering tools including mobile ethnography, vox-pop and over-shoulder analysis to unlock actionable insights.
#1.1: Enhancing Experiences
Consumers can seldom tell you what they need, but our mobile-first approach to ethnography allows us to analyse their everyday lives, rituals and behaviours and spot ways of enhancing their experiences.
#1.2: Best in Class
A combination of virtual over-the-shoulder in-use analysis and online screen-tracking allow us to observe consumers as they use your solution and research for best-in-class alternatives.
# 1.3: Best Possible
Consumers record ‘think piece’ videos exploring how their ‘ultimate’ experience might feel – allowing us to uncover rich behavioural and emotional insights into how your category could be optimised.
#2: We Leverage Technology Enablers
Breakthrough thinking frequently needs new science, new technology or new business models to rewrite the current rules of the game.
Our challenge is to identify the ‘technology enablers’ and ‘pointer’ examples that will inspire your team and free them from the constraints of your current reality, your current competencies – and potentially even the future capabilities of your organisation.
Spotting relevant emerging science and identifying potential partners with the technology skills you need – is a specialist skill. So, we partner with the highly experienced, technology scouting team at Idyl Consulting to spot the science enablers that will stimulate breakthrough thinking.
#2.1: Parallel Markets
Idyl will leverage their 30+ years’ experience in the raw materials, ingredients, consumer goods and health categories to uncover insights from pointer markets and parallel industries
#2.2: Tech Scouting
Idyl will scout the globe for science or technology solutions that can be creatively adapted and transferred cross industry to match your needs
# 2.3: Ideation Springboards
The Idyl team will identify strategic, technical solutions to your challenges – and bring each to life with real-life examples to inspire your team’s creative thinking.
#3: We’ll Help You Generate Disruptive Ideas That’ll Reframe Your Category
Spotting opportunties for consumer experience enhancement and identifying potential technology enablers is only part of the disruptive innovations challenge.
We use Category Reframing Workshops to create an empowering environment where your team can cast-off the constraints of the current market’s structure and fundamentally re-imagine how consumers’ unmet needs could be better satisfied by creatively leveraging new technology enablers and new business models.
Our face-to-face and virtual workshops are the perfect environment to share the consumer voices, explore how to better the best in class experience and leverage new technology and business models to reinvent the consumer experience.
Can You Afford To Do Nothing?
It’s tempting to think that during tough economic times – you should sit tight and protect your resources
But by thinking more experimentally and acting more entrepreneurially … you have an unbeatable opportunity to add disruptive value to your own market and build the Horizon Two & Three businesses streams that will represent your ‘future core’